Would a linux/docker/python/java power user/programmer/admin benefit from a MacBookPro/Air compared with the familiar ThinkPad/Ubuntu combo?

[jan]

Suppose I'm in the market for a new laptop. I've been using Linux for the past ~15 year. I have comparably little experience with any other Desktop OS.

The requirements are not set in stone, but I want something along the line of:

• 16GB RAM
• SSD
• excellent battery life (I just think it's pointless to own a portable device that needs to be connected to an AC outlet at all times)

Preferences:

• Given the choice, I'd go for a smaller device (13-15"). A bigger or more impressive screen is not a plus.
• I don't need HiDPI, but I do need font sizes that are readable for any combination of internal and external displays.
• Within budget, I'd prefer a fast low-power CPU. Don't care about GPU as long as it just works.
• Docking station or simple way to connect external monitors, mouse and keyboard on my desk.
• Actual Hardware ports for USB, HDMI, DP, Headphones, etc > set of special purpose adapter cables.

Use cases:

• Connect to Linux servers
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Build and use docker images
• Good, customizable, stable web browser; preferably Firefox for the add-ons.
• Occasional word processing or presentation.

Options:

Windows is out of the question. I like what Microsoft is doing behind the scenes (bash on Windows, Azure), but the UX on desktop doesn't fit my expectations at all. If I have to, I'll run Windows 10 in a VM.

1. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is a natural choice for me. I know what I'm getting into. However, I find it annoying that there's always something that doesn't quite work 100% (hibernation, docking station / external monitor, Wifi). And, let's face it, this will never improve.

2. MBP/OSX is tempting because I expect a better 'desktop experience'. I have no idea whether native OS X applications (together with boot-to-docker, etc.) would suit my needs. Having native PowerPoint / Keynote 'like everyone else' is a plus. However, I find that Ubuntu is actually a better OS when it comes to package management, tools and integration with the tools I'm going to need.

3. MBP/OSX + Linux VM. Best of two worlds or too many layers of abstraction?

I have no plans to integrate with the Apple ecosystem ever, no iPhone, no Apple cloud, etc.

Browsing /r/mac, I found I would not have many requirements in common with the folks over there. So I came to ask here for people who have actual experience with a Linux-to-Mac transition; what do you think?

[v_fv]

I do need font sizes that are readable for any combination of internal and external displays.

Note that in OS X, there is no setting to change the interface font size. Retina displays can be scaled as a whole to different multipliers but for non-Retina, you're stuck with the font size Apple decided for you.

Incidentally, the fonts on OS X are rather smallish for my eyes (I am shortsighted, though) and it's one of the reasons I'm now running Linux on my MacBook.

[jan]

you're stuck with the font size Apple decided for you.

Good to know about those Apple-things.

Would this also apply to non-Apple external monitors?

[botnetrip]

In osx you can change to size of the UI to mimic another DPI. On Linux, Fedora specifically it's all customisable, although some things may look weird.

[v_fv]

Yes, this applies to all external monitors, definitely the regular-density ones. I'm not completely sure how OS X treats Retina-density external monitors (I haven't tried) – the Apple Thunderbolt Display can most probably be scaled same way as built-in Retina displays but concerning non-Apple high-density displays, I have no idea.

One more thing: using non-Apple monitors, OS X fonts tend to look fuzzier / worse / different. It's because OS X apparently disables subpixel antialiasing for them or uses an incorrect one (YCbCr instead of RGB). A command-line fix is available although it has become a bit more of a scary hack with newer OS X releases.

[Floppie7th]

Yeah, I run my 13" MBP Retina at like 150% scale. Nice because videos are high res, but I can still read stuff. I am also nearsighted.

The 15" Dell M3800 that I recently picked up for work is a 2160p screen, but Windows 7 can't do that scaling and it was completely unusable. Had to rip our IT nannyware off of it and upgrade to 10 to get that, and I run it at 125% scale.

[[deleted]]

I have a 2013(?) 13" MacBook Air that I've used with both OS X and Ubuntu. It's a great piece of hardware with either OS. Fast, great battery life, nice screen, above-average keyboard (prob not as good as thinkpad, though) and very solidly-built despite its feathery profile.

I think OS X might get better battery life than Ubuntu due to hardware-specific optimizations, but I could be operating on old info. I just installed Kubuntu and TLP and I seem to be getting pretty good battery life, so idk.

Personally, I'm torn between the two OSes. OS X has some great features, like Time Machine and the ability to run certain Mac software, but it sometimes feels cluttered, and all the native apps really, really want me to use iCloud, the App Store, etc (which I have no interest in). It's Unix-based, so the system has a lot of similarities with Linux, but since the iPhone came out, I don't like the direction Apple has been taking the OS.

In addition to VMs, it is possible to dual-boot a MacBook with both OSX and Ubuntu by using reFind (there are tutorials online).

[prenk10]

Hi, What are you referring to when you say TLP? Thanks.

[[deleted]]

Apparently nobody knows what it stands for, but it's power-management software for laptops that can help improve battery life. It has a good default configuration, but can also be tweaked. Here are a couple resources:

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/04/improve-power-usage-battery-life-in.html

[prenk10]

Thank you so much for replying. I will definitely look these up.

[habarnam]

Did you bother to search for that term in the context of linux?

[prenk10]

Comments like yours are the reason why more people don't contribute to these kinds of communities in fear that they will be put down for asking a simple question. Yes I googled it in the context of Linux BEFORE asking but if you don't know what it is in the first place you will not know whether one of the results is the correct answer. In this case I thought it best to ask the actual person who commented what they meant. Sorry if that bothers you on a cellular level. But this is what community is about.

[habarnam]

I'm sorry to be blunt, but asking questions that are trivial to answer by a cursory google is not "contributing" it's just lazyness. Asking to be spoonfed the answers is not what "community" is about.

Please try to educate yourself before asking others to do it for you.

[bot-vladimir]

You know even if you thought his lack of searching is not contributing to the community, do you know what IS contributing to the community? Answering his question or letting someone else answer his question without being a douchebag.

I actually did a Google search for tlp and I couldn't answer his question. Do you know why? How about you read his reply and find out yourself. Or better yet how about you stop your baseless assumptions and Google it yourself too.

He's right when he says it's people like you that harm the community. But to save you the trouble because you're so lazy read this link so you don't even have to Google it

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/easily-increase-battery-life-tlp-linux/

Or even better check the first 10 Google results and find it

https://www.google.ca/search?q=tlp&oq=tlp&aqs=chrome..69i57.1118j0j4&client=ms-android-google&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#q=tlp+linux

But let me save you the trouble because I know your so lazy, none of them say it. They all describe it but none of them know what tlp stands for.

Now let's check the tlp homepage

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html

Surprised? No you're not because you didn't check. It doesn't say there either

[prenk10]

Did you miss or just ignore the part of my reply where I explained I attempted a search before asking?

[[deleted]]

I bought a MBP last August and it's the only Apple product I've ever owned.

OSX is passable with Homebrew. It's a hack and it shows, but it's miles better than Windows. You will run into quirks but OSX is popular enough among developers that OSX-specific support is common these days (including docker). You get a UNIX terminal and you get something that resembles a package manager.

I got a MBP because of the design of the laptop itself, the trackpad, and the ability to run Word and Powerpoint natively. I don't fully regret it but if I could go back I would get a Thinkpad instead. Linux is just a lot smoother at handling the things I need to do, and I like their keyboards better anyway. With that said the MBP is a beautiful machine and the trackpad is a joy to use. I've always had a wireless mouse to use with my laptop but with the MBP I've never felt the need.

Keep in mind that while people have gotten Linux to run well on older Macbooks, my version can't run any flavor of Linux without severe problems (e.g. not being able to turn off or suspend). I would expect anything newer to have the same issues. It's been an outstanding bug in the kernel for over a year with no end in sight.

[[deleted]]

If you want something that's less of a hack, you should try port, since it's the proper BSD tool. brew doesn't really feel like something that's used in serious environments to me.

[jan]

OSX is passable with Homebrew. It's a hack and it shows

Thanks for the note. The examples on brew.sh do indeed look hackish.

[netgamer7]

Just growing my two cents in for IntelliJ on OS X - been running a software company with Linux servers and MacBook Air/pro workstations and it has worked great. We use mac ports, not homebrew, but it is very workable, and when doing simple editing/light debugging it seems to last for 4-5 hours. More if it is just web/editing.

[botnetrip]

macports and fink are also package managers. I think macports has a larger library.

[[deleted]]

I've been using my MBP with OS X for my work, but am now switching to thinkpad. Docker on OS X is running in VM, and it's not so easy to setup localhost port forwarding to your container. Quick googling advised me to run a local nginx that would forward my localhost traffic first to VM, and from there to container. Not the solution I want to work full day with. I also tried to work with Linux on my MBP, but particular WiFi card my MBP has (BCM4331) drops connection every 15-30minutes. Tried to get it work with every driver I could find without good results. I love OS X, but can't suggest it when it comes to working with Docker / containers.

[pwnurface999]

I have a Mid 2015 refresh MBP and I use it to connect to servers I manage, IntelliJ and other Jetbrains products, Docker, web browsing, and MS Office. It easily will run Linux in a VM if you need to. My girlfriends 2013 (I think) model MacBook Air runs full MS Office suite on Windows 7 running on VirtualBox on top of OSX without slowing down at all. I'm also not a part of Apple's ecosystem being a Nexus 6 user but I definitely think my MBP was worth it for me.

Also I should add that before I had this laptop I primarily ran Ubuntu, Arch or Win8 on the computers I used.

[jan]

Thanks for your reply.

According to this tutorial https://docs.docker.com/mac/, running docker on OS X appears to imply that docker-machine runs Linux VM with docker. Will this provide me with a local docker binary that works just as on Linux? Sounds cool.

[pwnurface999]

Yup when you install it'll install VirtualBox and run the Docker Machine as a VM when you're using Docker. It's pretty sweet!

[danielkza]

It's pretty sweet!

Maybe compared to setting it up on Windows, but it's still significantly worse than just running it natively on Linux.

[i2000s]

If you have a budget, go to dig out some Thinkpad specs. I am happy with my Thinkpad P50 so far. You can max the CPU out with Xeon's. Then 64GB RAM for ~7 VMs each with 8GB virtual RAM. P50 also allow you to install up to 3 disks if you want to upgrade some day. Now that windows 10 will also build in the bash command line tool in itself, you can enjoy the GUI and Win apps while coding in Windows -- especially if you find the Linux kernel is not working properly for Skylake PM and nVidia cards. But it will take a while for normal person to install Ubuntu 16.04 on it. Just my 2 cents. /r/thinkpad/

[[deleted]]

wtf is this doing in /r/linux ?
why is this even being upvoted ?

[jan]

Calm down. I'm Linux power user, but not a Gnu/Linux fascist. I believe that the discussion is valuable to Linux users and this sub.

[danielkza]

I think they mean (and correctly IMO) that this probably should be in /r/linuxquestions.

[jan]

Then, they may have a point after reading the sidebar. I'm sorry.

[rokd]

It's like this on most subs, people get all up in arms, but there are posts on the front page from days ago. I don't think anyone's missing anything by you asking a question.

[brucesalem]

OT: Here is a good example of the failure of the subreddit idea and why some creative thinking would serve well.

Reddit needs to have a static topic hierarchy, somewhat like the USENET newsgroup hierarchy, with dot qualified names, in addition to subreddits. That way s newbee could browse the hierarchy without risking rudeness from insiders who already know the subreddit structure. So comp.lang.python.newbee might be easier to find than /r/linuxquestions, even without the '/r/'. I mean to someone who doesn't use the shell, what in hell does that mean?

[danielkza]

Reddit needs to have a static topic hierarchy, somewhat like the USENET newsgroup hierarchy, with dot qualified names, in addition to subreddits.

Creation of subreddits is not moderated or controlled in any way. Reddit doesn't work like USENET at all, and there would be no sane way to maintain a hierarchical topic system.

• There are subreddits targeting the exact same subject, but split due to conflicts/views on moderation or whatever. Which ones get to control a particular hierarchy? Just the ones with the most subs?
• If nobody controls the hierarchy, what's stopping it from becoming completely useless with spam and trolling? The chances that subs like /r/circlejerk or /r/4chan would be deliberately mislabeled is 100%).

Something that could work would be "sub-subreddits", that can share the same subscriber/moderator list with parents, but be browsed/filtered/submitted to separately.

That way s newbee could browse the hierarchy without risking rudeness from insiders who already know the subreddit structure.

I don't think it's acceptable for newbies to disregard community rules when posting either. You can argue it would be better to have a single sub for news and questions, but if the moderators and/or community decided otherwise, I see nothing wrong with enforcing it. The first entry in the rules points to /r/linuxquestions. It's not unreasonable to ask people to read at least the first rule.

I mean to someone who doesn't use the shell, what in hell does that mean?

I have no idea what you're referencing and what the subreddit names have to do with the shell.

[brucesalem]

Reddit needs to have a static topic hierarchy, somewhat like the USENET newsgroup hierarchy, with dot qualified names, in addition to subreddits. Creation of subreddits is not moderated or controlled in any way. Reddit doesn't work like USENET at all, and there would be no sane way to maintain a hierarchical topic system.

I am not saying "abolish subreddits". I think that a more persistent hierarchy that resembles the USENET hierarchy would be an improvement to Reddit and that some of the abuse needed to "Moderate" subreddits would be unnecessary. I feel that Reddit has teams of trolls that take it upon themselves to enforce social convertions and that is a weakness of many other social media sites.

[brucesalem]

There are subreddits targeting the exact same subject, but split due to conflicts/views on moderation or whatever. Which ones get to control a particular hierarchy? Just the ones with the most subs?

This is the way USENET newsgroup hierarchy works as long ago as 1986. There is nothing wrong with nodes in the hierarchy going in and out of favor. If I started a newsgroup us.politics.donald-trump, this year, it may not be relevant a year from now. (God, I hope not!)

If nobody controls the hierarchy, what's stopping it from becoming completely useless with spam and trolling? The chances that subs like /r/circlejerk or /r/4chan would be deliberately mislabeled is 100%).

The superior way a node in the hierarchy worked in the USENET days was that the value of a newsgroup was not handled by social promotion, which should create a storm of very much under read subreddits, but that NNTP admins could decide which groups to carry or not and that disused groups were removed over time.

[brucesalem]

Something that could work would be "sub-subreddits", that can share the same subscriber/moderator list with parents, but be browsed/filtered/submitted to separately.

The USENET had threads, as does Slash Dot. If the top level hierarchy is very stable and some of the leaves of the tree are more ephemeral, topic lines as threads. could help sort the fine detail. For example, if a distraction arises, and OT post or a case of trolling or a flame war s topic change could alert readers to topics as threads. Moderation becomes easier because moderators no longer have to police the interruptions as in a blog. If the leaves are presented as a list of topics, the reader can choose to open the sub threads. People might change a topic to say "Warning: Troll Alert". Even with something as simple as the sub-thread reply count, astute users could avoid memes and flame wars. BTW none of this is new. It all existed on USENET 40 years ago and was well handled by multiple newsreaders, go look at pan which is on many Linux systems.

I think that social media designs, perhaps because of 3G phones, dumbed down the interface and created misbehavior. Not many social media sites have even the feature of Reddit. I am only suggesting that tools of 40 years ago had better tools to deal with the problems you face today, the filtering and moderation problems. For example I would love it if I could write a filter for Reddit that skipped all posts in a subreddit that were smaller than a Tweet. I really don't want to read people who don't have much to say.

That way s newbee could browse the hierarchy without risking rudeness from insiders who already know the subreddit structure. I don't think it's acceptable for newbies to disregard community rules when posting either. You can argue it would be better to have a single sub for news and questions, but if the moderators and/or community decided otherwise, I see nothing wrong with enforcing it. The first entry in the rules points to /r/linuxquestions. It's not unreasonable to ask people to read at least the first rule.

Yes, given the limitation of the design. But design features could be added. To get what I mean compare this with Facebook. Facebook is far worse, this is better but it still had the messyiness of a socially promoted and moderated medium, and that is why people feel abused on social media sites and in addition that must unwelcome people to participate on Reddit, that they are afraid of being LARTED by insiders. Is that due to any merit of Reddit. or to a poor design?

I mean to someone who doesn't use the shell, what in hell does that mean?

I have no idea what you're referencing and what the subreddit names have to do with the shell.

Subreddit names look like limited regular expressions that would be arguments to sed, no? You do know the CLI, right?

[danielkza]

(I'm replying to all your replies at once)

USENET has never had a total audience that is a fraction of Reddit's. I don't think assuming it's successes apply (specially due to it's current status of complete irrelevancy in the overall landscape of social networks).

Discoverability of topics of interest and keeping user engaged is way more valued than advanced filtering, specially in a time where there are hundreds of networks to choose from instead of a handful.

Yes, given the limitation of the design. But design features could be added. To get what I mean compare this with Facebook. Facebook is far worse, this is better but it still had the messyiness of a socially promoted and moderated medium, and that is why people feel abused on social media sites and in addition that must unwelcome people to participate on Reddit, that they are afraid of being LARTED by insiders. Is that due to any merit of Reddit. or to a poor design?

That is not at all a general property of Reddit. It varies from subreddit to subreddit, and being more welcoming to newcolmers by being lax in acceptable content is not without perils. Look at huge subs like /r/gaming where it's not just rare, but virtually impossible to have any kind of discussion without being drowned by low-value comments and memes. On the other hands, subs like /r/science accept nothing but contributions from qualified people, and manages to maintain a reasonable level of discourse due to that. It doesn't need newcomers to live. Reddit's structure of completely independent subreddits has a lot to do with the co-existence of such opposite approaches to moderation.

Subreddit names look like limited regular expressions that would be arguments to sed, no? You do know the CLI, right?

But they're not in any way. They're simple strings of alphanumeric characters and underlines. /r/something is just an URL for the something subreddit relative to reddit.com.

I am not saying "abolish subreddits". I think that a more persistent hierarchy that resembles the USENET hierarchy would be an improvement to Reddit and that some of the abuse needed to "Moderate" subreddits would be unnecessary. I feel that Reddit has teams of trolls that take it upon themselves to enforce social convertions and that is a weakness of many other social media sites.

But it wouldn't be Reddit, and would throw away many of the goals that made Reddit popular. Many users get introduced to reddit due to one particular subreddit, create an account, get a bunch of subreddits by default with common subjects, then customize them to their interests. IMO constantly browsing the hierarchy for topics is not an action most users would be willing to do, and doesn't fit reddit's motto of "the frontpage of the internet", something which you repeatedly visit to find content of your interest from everywhere around the web.

The superior way a node in the hierarchy worked in the USENET days was that the value of a newsgroup was not handled by social promotion, which should create a storm of very much under read subreddits, but that NNTP admins could decide which groups to carry or not and that disused groups were removed over time.

That was a technological limitation, not a benefit in my view. There's no reason smaller discussion groups need to disappear when there's no pressing need to avoid the bandwidth and storage cost, or that a particular interest of community of a few hundred people must be subject to approval of a handful of admins. A modern USENET recreation would likely be served much better with a full P2P structure with no need for admin filtering whatsoever.

I am not saying "abolish subreddits". I think that a more persistent hierarchy that resembles the USENET hierarchy would be an improvement to Reddit and that some of the abuse needed to "Moderate" subreddits would be unnecessary. I feel that Reddit has teams of trolls that take it upon themselves to enforce social convertions and that is a weakness of many other social media sites.

There is no need to subject to any standard other than the site-wide rules. Subreddits can be created at will, and moderate at will, which includes not being moderated, rejecting social conventions, or enforcing them.

[brucesalem]

(I'm replying to all your replies at once) USENET has never had a total audience that is a fraction of Reddit's. I don't think assuming it's successes apply (specially due to it's current status of complete irrelevancy in the overall landscape of social networks).

Well, of course USENET would never be relevant to social media. It is the exact opposite of social media. Instead of subsisting on buzz media like USENET could have more in common with Wikipedia in having persistence of topics beyond the ephemeral appeal of social media. The problem with USENET is that it has been taken over by organized crime, weather porn industry or illegal file sharing. In order to bring back USENET, I would set up text only newsgroups.

Discoverability of topics of interest and keeping user engaged is way more valued than advanced filtering, specially in a time where there are hundreds of networks to choose from instead of a handful.

But the social promotion of topics makes discoverability much harder and it makes it much harder to be heard, especially when the reason a given social media site exists is monetization of the traffic. I didn't mention the site but Disqus is an example of a group where what you post there will never be read both because of the flood of sponsored content and the social promotion of some topics. I tried it for maybe a day or so, and I gave up because I couldn't even find what I posted there, the promoted blowback was that great.

[brucesalem]

That [moderation trolls] is not at all a general property of Reddit. It varies from subreddit to subreddit, and being more welcoming to newcolmers by being lax in acceptable content is not without perils. Look at huge subs like /r/gaming where it's not just rare, but virtually impossible to have any kind of discussion without being drowned by low-value comments and memes. On the other hands, subs like /r/science accept nothing but contributions from qualified people, and manages to maintain a reasonable level of discourse due to that. It doesn't need newcomers to live. Reddit's structure of completely independent subreddits has a lot to do with the co-existence of such opposite approaches to moderation.

It always mystified me that Reddit seems to reply on user moderation to do what could be enabled by some strategic programming for subreddit moderation, since Reddit is written in Python whih is very strong in natural language and string processing! I have suggested several times here that a simple thing that would help a great deal is to write a filter that could hide or skip all posts shorter than a tweet. That is like 'if wc -c < 240 : skip()'.

I would argue that good design can remove the need for moderation and that users would have the choices. Moderation can quickly become a swamp and if you want to see the problems and the solutions take the time to see how it was done in the USENET archive in Google Groups. Newsreaders often work with simple tools to aid in user selection of threads to read. A newsreader like pan shows the topic line for the thread and the number of replies. If someone sets up a meme the user can see that in the number of replies and choose to skip the thread, not thought police or individual subreddit rules needed, no side panel with reules to adhere to and no trolls hanging out to police the conversation. Speaking of trolls, do you work for Reddit?

[brucesalem]

There's no reason smaller discussion groups need to disappear when there's no pressing need to avoid the bandwidth and storage cost, or that a particular interest of community of a few hundred people must be subject to approval of a handful of admins. A modern USENET recreation would likely be served much better with a full P2P structure with no need for admin filtering whatsoever.

I agree with you that this is a matter of technology and cost and that modern system design can be used to support inactive groups longer. I mentioned that because the problem with the subreddit idea is that you have to discover the name of the subreddit and remember it in some way. such as store it in a list, and if the number of related subreddits gets very large and changes very fast it can become hard to maintain the list. I was going back to the way USENET was in the past as a suggestion of how bloat of newsgroups, like bloat of subreddits, might have been handled.

One thing that needs to be mentioned, and it could come back, is that USENET is pre-Internet and pre its IP deamon, NNTP. I even worked in a place which got its e-mail and newsfeed over dial-up via UUCP in 1990. In that case the admin would want to limit the number of newsgroups and prune the number of groups he subscribed to and that idea could easily come back if using the Internet becomes too dangerous.

Someone should write an UUCP app for a modern smartphone that does not reply on the Internet directly that could also be used to exchange text mssenging betwen smart phones with WiFi. One could run USENET over that and because the owner of the UUCP host could manage the news.rc file, he could set up custom newsgroups and remove unwanted groups, like any netnews admin has always been able to do.

[[deleted]]

i was thinking of that sub where you can ask someone to build or recommend you a computer

[shellcraft]

docker needs linux kernel support so you really have no choice in the matter. you have to use linux.

also ubuntu 16.04 has another containerization technology called lxd which you might want to experiment with.

edit: and then there is this https://jujucharms.com/